Tapped: The Prospect Group Blog

Nearly two years after the first reports of Flint’s contaminated water, Michigan has finally received funding to create a registry for affected residents.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will award $14.4 million over four years to Michigan State University to create a registry for Flint residents exposed to lead-contaminated water. The water crisis, which began in 2014, put nearly 100,000 Flint residents at risk, and it took more than a year of resident complaints for the city government to come up with an action plan. Flint residents are still recommended to steer clear from drinking unfiltered water.

The Flint Lead Exposure Registry, directly funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the budget of which Trump proposes to cut by more than $1 billion), will enable officials to identify and monitor residents exposed to lead-contaminated water and connect them to health services, according to Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who is leading the registry effort.

“The registry will be a powerful tool to understand, measure, and improve the lives of those exposed to the contaminated water,” said Hanna-Attisha in a written statement. “The more people who participate in the registry, the more powerful this tool will be for Flint and for communities everywhere that continue to suffer from preventable lead exposure.”

President Barack Obama signed the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act in December of 2016, almost a year after Michigan’s senators proposed an aid package for Flint. The act granted Flint $170 million in recovery funds, including $100 million in March from the Environmental Protection Agency for updating drinking-water infrastructure, and the August 1 announcement of funding for the registry.

“Though the State of Michigan has the primary responsibility to support long-term recovery efforts in Flint, the federal government should have stepped in long ago to provide emergency assistance for an American city in crisis,” said Michigan Senator Gary Peters after the act’s passage.

The crisis in Flint began in April 2014, when the city, under state emergency management, switched its water supply from Detroit’s system to the Flint River, which had not been treated for corrosion. In September 2015, Hanna-Attisha reported that, after Flint switched to the Flint River source, the number of children with elevated blood-lead levels had almost doubled—from 2.1 percent to 4 percent.

Research conducted by Virginia Tech found water in one Flint resident’s home to have lead levels between 200 and 13,200 parts per billion, far exceeding the EPA’s action threshold of 15 parts per billion. According to the EPA, “In children, low levels of exposure have been linked to damage to the central and peripheral nervous system, learning disabilities, shorter stature, impaired hearing, and impaired formation and function of blood cells.”

In January 2016, President Obama declared a state of emergency in Flint, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover up to $5 million in costs for water, filters, and other supplies needed by residents. Flint switched back to its original Detroit source in October, and while lead levels improved, officials still advise residents to drink filtered or bottled water.

Flint Mayor Karen Weaver and the head of Flint’s pipe-replacement program have said that Flint is still years away from having safe unfiltered water.

Arizona’s senators are having a moment. Shortly after John McCain made headlines by joining with Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to cast a Republican health-care bill into the legislative charnel house, Jeff Flake, a first-term Republican from the suburbs east of Phoenix, has put out a new book lambasting President Donald Trump.

Flake acknowledges his own former complacency. Although he called for Trump to quit the presidential race after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced in October, Flake would later make a habit of saying he lacked the time to read the president’s tweets. Now, he admits his position was a cop-out. For the Republicans, Flake writes, Trump’s candidacy amounted to a “Faustian bargain”—one, he now believes, was “not worth it.”

“In this era of dysfunction and collapsed principle, our only accomplishment is painstakingly constructing the argument that we’re not to blame and hoping that we’ve gerrymandered ourselves well enough to be safe in the next election,” Flake wrote of his Republican colleagues. His main pitch is one of bipartisan cooperation and allegiance to congressional norms, coupled with his desire to return to old-school small government conservatism. That—and his folksy charm—has prompted a slew of admiringprofiles and interviews in recent weeks.

The GOP has not reacted happily to Flake’s criticisms. Kelli Ward, a far-right former state senator challenging him in the Republican primary next year, called Flake a “globalist,” tweeting that America is “strong [and] unapologetic” under Trump. (“Globalist” is a term frequently used by alt-right commentators to imply that their targets are Jewish or influenced by Jews. Flake is Mormon.) Trump has pledged $10 million of his own money to beat Flake in the Republican primary, an unprecedented move by a president against an incumbent of his own party. The conservative Washington Times published an op-ed calling Flake an “elitist” and a “defector […] to the Democratic side” before blasting him for his pro-amnesty position on illegal immigration.

Although considered the second-most vulnerable Republican up for re-election in 2018 after Nevada’s Dean Heller, Flake has not yet drawn a serious Democratic challenger. Thus far, the only Democrats who have announced campaigns are two little-known attorneys and a retired judge who once served in Iowa’s state legislature. Several prominent Democrats—including astronaut Mark Kelly, the husband of former Representative Gabrielle Giffords; Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton; and Representative Krysten Sinema—have not fully ruled out campaigns. Flake’s approval rating in his home state lags his disapproval rating by 8 percentage points, and in 2012 he defeated Democrat Richard Carmona by just 3 points.

For the Democrats to regain the Senate in 2018—a tall order, given that they are defending 23 seats while Republicans defend just eight—the most likely path goes through Arizona. Flake may well be vulnerable to Democratic attacks by virtue of his support for repealing Obamacare. But it seems unlikely that a Democratic candidate could simply run an anti-Trump campaign against Flake—after all, his 160-page tirade against the president is as strongly worded as most Democratic senators’ anti-Trump jeremiads.

Included in President Donald Trump’s proposed $6 billion cut to the Department of Housing and Urban Development is the elimination of a small but vital program that has been a crucial force in driving down the U.S. homeless population.

The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) has a scheduled sunset date of October 2017 and, for the first time since the Clinton administration, it may not be reauthorized.

First created in 1987, USICH’s 19 government member agencies coordinate 23 federal programs to combat homelessness. With an operating budget of $3.5 million a year, the program collaborates with both federal and local government and the private sector to help provide the nation’s homeless with food, shelter, health care, and jobs.

In 2010, the program launched “Opening Doors,” a comprehensive plan that focuses on leadership, collaboration, and civic engagement; access to stable and affordable housing; economic security; health and stability; and the homelessness crisis response system.

Five years after the plan was launched, nationwide homelessness had decreased by 14 percent, or 87,000 individuals (some 550,000 people in the United States do not have a home as of 2016). Homelessness among veterans decreased by 47 percent, chronic homelessness by 27 percent, and family homelessness by 23 percent.

The Urban Institute interviewed more than 50 national and local homelessness advocates, most of whom attributed the progress to USICH. Urban Institute research associate Sarah Gillespie told the Prospect that advocates referred to USICH’s Opening Doors plan as a “leader” in the fight to end homelessness.

“It can be hard coordinating with 19 federal agencies,” Gillespie says. “USICH helps the federal government speak as one voice, navigate as a bureaucracy, ... marshall resources together, and make sure that everyone is on the same page.”

Before Opening Doors, there was little understanding of how many veterans were homeless because the Department of Veteran Affairs only counted veterans who used VA services. Opening Doors worked with the VA and HUD to create a more accurate count, and worked with federal partners to develop a set of benchmark criteria for ending veteran homelessness. Today, 47 cities and counties and three states have announced they have met those criteria.

Advocates also credit USICH with changing federal homelessness policy to a focus on housing first, Gillespie says. Previously, the federal government provided sobering services, and required similar preconditions before providing housing.

“Even though people will try to keep working to end homelessness,” Gillespie says,” no one could fill the role that USICH plays.”

Saturday, July 22 marks the 30-year anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, the federal government’s first major legislative response to homelessness. One important—and controversial—section of the law requires states to remove educational barriers experienced by homeless children and youth, out of recognition that many homeless children cannot enroll in school for a host of bureaucratic and logistical reasons.

Three decades later, there are 1.3 million homeless students in U.S. schools, an increase of 160 percent since 1987. And there are hundreds of thousands more homeless children who have already dropped out, or are still too young to be enrolled in school.

A new policy brief published by Liz Cohen of the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness and Barbara Duffield, of the SchoolHouse Connection, looks at where progress has been made at addressing the intersections of homelessness and education, and where work—lots of it—remains to be done.

The authors give the McKinney-Vento Act real credit, not only for providing financial resources to school districts to help homeless students, but also for the “statistical insights mandated by the Act.” They acknowledge that many homeless students would have never enrolled in any school without the law’s protections.

They also note, however, that many students are never properly identified as homeless, so there may be large numbers of children who never have access to services they are entitled to.

In an interview with the Prospect, Cohen expressed frustration that homeless students have not been treated as a distinct subgroup of underserved, vulnerable students.

“The majority of the education reform movement has focused on low-income kids, minority kids, children with disabilities or English-language learners, but homeless children have never really been recognized as anything but low-income students,” she says. “Obviously homeless students are low-income, but there are some important differences in educational outcomes and experiences for children who are currently or formerly experiencing housing instability than for poor students who haven’t.”

Though there’s a great deal of work to do, Cohen says she’s optimistic about the future—pointing to the Every Students Succeeds Act which passed in 2015. This new federal education law requires—for the first time—that schools specifically report the graduation rates of homeless students. Prior to the law’s passage only five states reported the graduation rates for homeless students.

As Cohen and Duffield write at the conclusion of their report:

We can’t say whether we will have ended family and youth homelessness in the next thirty years. Sadly, the rights and services provided by the McKinney-Vento Act may well still be needed at that time. But the wisdom we’ve gleaned from the past thirty years could propel us to make much more progress in the decades to come. What we can and must achieve, however, is to put homeless students on the map. … Our nation and communities must provide adequate resources to boost academic achievement, as well as for mental and physical health needs. Homeless students must know that they are safe in school, and have adults who can and will advocate for them. Their hopes and dreams must guide us, with urgency, as we learn from the past and step into the future.

As President Donald Trump’s so-called Election Integrity commission met near the White House for the first time on Wednesday morning, roughly 150 protesters gathered outside to voice their opposition to what many criticize as a thinly veiled attempt at voter suppression.

The rally, organized by the nonprofit Hip Hop Caucus’s Respect My Vote! campaign, included American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, the Democracy Initiative, and the NAACP Legal Education Defense Fund, which along with other organizations in attendance has filed a lawsuit against what policy director Todd Cox describes as the “Commission on Election Suppression.”

The commission, led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was created to address Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. The commission has already requested information including voters’ Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, dates of birth, and email addresses from individual states, leading to fears of widespread deregistration because of privacy concerns. Forty-four states have expressed opposition to the commission’s work, though 17 plan to hand over publicly available records. On Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers requested Kobach’s removal from the commission, citing Kobach’s past unsubstantiated fraud claims and conflicts of interest.

The “election integrity” commission’s purpose, says Cox, is to “lay the groundwork for a nationwide voter-intimidation campaign that will disenfranchise African American and Latino voters.”

“We are watching, we are organizing, and we’re here to make sure every eligible American can vote, and has their ballot count as it was cast,” Common Cause President Karen Hobert Flynn, who was at the protest, told the Prospect.

Protesters first assembled on Pennsylvania Avenue before officers in Secret Service vests ordered the group to move into Lafayette Square. Officers then instructed protesters to clear the park and move to the sidewalk, leading the president of the Hip Hop Caucus, Reverend Lennox Yearwood, to express his disappointment to protesters: “We have a permitted rally and were actually kicked out of the park with guns. That’s disheartening, because this is the people’s house, the place where people can come to this country and protest in a peaceful way.” (The Secret Service said they had not removed protesters and directed comment to the Park Police. A Park Police spokesman said the department’s officers were not involved, referring questions back to the Secret Service, which did not provide details by press time.)

Wendy Fields, protest speaker and executive director of the Democracy Initiative, told the Prospect that the commission should be looking for ways to achieve 100 percent eligible-voter participation, and not hiding behind the “guise of voter fraud.”

“It’s not just about elections,” Fields says. “Voting is about our ability to influence the policies that are being debated all across the country. It’s about making sure that people are participating in basic civil engagement.”

If elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, Danica Roem would be the first openly transgender state representative in the United States. The 32-year-old Manassas native won a four-way Democratic primary on a platform of transportation, economic development, education, and inclusion, and is now running for Virginia’s 13th District against 11-term Republican incumbent Delegate Bob Marshall, who is known for having proposed earlier this year a bill torestrict transgender people’s public bathroom use.

The Prospect spoke to Roem over the phone about her campaign. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Ira Berkley: What are you most focused on in your campaign?

Danica Roem: We have to focus on fixing our existing infrastructure first. [Delegate Marshall] is more concerned with how I as a transgender person go to the bathroom versus how his constituents get to work. Transgender people actually have public policy ideas that are applicable, that make sense, that would make good public policy, just like anyone else. If you have good public policy ideas, you have a right as an American to bring those ideas to the table. I’m out to prove that yes, transgender people are just as capable of fully funding transportation, taking care of land use issues, taking care of education, taking care of economic development as anyone else. I’m going to be focused on transportation, economic development, education, health care, quality-of-life stuff, while not being afraid to champion nondiscrimination policies.

What was it like growing up in Manassas, Virginia, and what shaped your politics?

I knew I was transgender from the time I was in fifth grade. So, growing up as a closet case in the 1990s was not easy. I came out to one person before college, and only said I was bi. I used sexuality as a stepping stone to get to gender identity, because the homophobic slurs that would be thrown around from my childhood on were severe, and I know what it's like to be singled out for the perception of being gay, let alone the reality of being transgender. Any chance I had for feminine expression I had to do in the privacy of my own room because I was too afraid to step out of my house.

In the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush was floating the idea of supporting a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality. That was a pivotal moment for me, because by that point I was in my sophomore year of college, I had come out to a lot of my female friends in regards to sexuality, and to some in regards to [being] transgender. But to see the president use the Constitution as a wedge to divide LGBTQ people from their neighbors spurred my interest in politics.

[Barack Obama’s] presidency was absolutely transformative in every sense of the word. He is the first president in my life who looked at LGBTQ people and said, “You are equal and contributing members of society and no one should discriminate against you.” He was the first president who was completely affirming of transgender people. Compare his demeanor to the demeanor of President Trump—it’s night and day. We have someone who has demonstrated that he’s not fit to lead. To me, all Trump’s election showed me is that there is literally nothing in my background to disqualify me for office.

How did Marshall’s history of anti-LGBT remarks and policies factor into your decision to run? How do you feel about the distinction of being, if elected, the first openly transgender state legislator in the United States?

All it means [is] that a transgender person would have the opportunity to finally fix [state] Route 28! But I also understand it from a much broader sense. I’ve talked to a lot of LGBTQ constituents within the district who very actively support my campaign and who see someone willing to champion things that they believe in.

I was deeply unsatisfied with [Marshall’s] constituent service and the fact that he has singled out and stigmatized his own constituents over and over again. After 25 years of being his constituent, I was fed up, and it was time to do something about it. The Trump campaign cemented it. Either we just complain on our computers, or we stand up and do something.

In one of a handful of states vowing to comply with President Trump’s “voter fraud” commission, voters have begun preemptively withdrawing their registration en masse.

In cities across Colorado, hundreds of individuals have asked to be withdrawn from voter rolls following the administration’s June 28 request for personal voter data from each state. In Denver, where almost 200 people took themselves out of the franchise on July 6 alone, Director of Elections Amber McReynolds told The Colorado Independent that “confusion [and] hysteria” are rampant.

While more than a dozen states have refused to work with the administration, Colorado has welcomed the investigation. Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Republican, has promised to share publicly available data, including voters’ full names, addresses, and voting history since 2006. Although Williams will not comply with the administration’s request for confidential information, such as Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, full dates of birth, or email addresses, many Colorado voters are worried and have already begun removing themselves from voter rolls.

Exact registration tallies are handled at the local level, but numerous counties—notably, heavily Democratic Boulder, Denver, and Arapahoe—have all seen voters canceling their registrations, though some plan to re-register after the state hands over data to Trump’s commission on July 14. Colorado’s 2017 statistics show 3,305,245 voters registered. Roughly 1,000 are known to have deregistered so far, while many others have opted for confidential voter status, which carries a fee and removes most of a voter’s information from publicly available records.

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was formed by Trump to investigate what the president believes was widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election. His claims of voter fraud—which he says handed his opponent a popular vote victory—have not been supported by independent analysis. The commission is also seeking voters’ dates of birth, political party registration, felony convictions, registration information from other states, military status, and information on overseas residence. Some of this information is publicly available, but much of it is not, though individual states’ laws vary.

Williams’s actions are not as unique as they may seem. Although 44 states have expressed opposition to the electoral commission’s work, some will still hand over their public records, as Williams plans to, while registering their distaste at so doing. Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, for instance, has said he is “bound by law” to turn over public records, though he has stated he will seek advice from the state’s attorney general on whether he can deny Trump’s request outright.

Williams’s relative enthusiasm may be the sticking point for some Coloradans. While many secretaries of state emphasized that they would not be turning over confidential data, Williams’s office put out a press release that praised the commission’s work and expressed its cooperation. “We are very glad they are asking for information before making decisions,” Williams said.

Although many news outlets have reported that 44 states—not including Colorado—oppose the request, fully 17 have announced they will hand over publicly available information, although Wisconsin has requested payment for doing so. Colorado’s largest newspaper, The Denver Post, editorialized in favor of providing public records to the commission but only advocated doing so for an appropriate fee.

The North Atlantic’s marine life may soon be treated to near-constant seismic blasts as energy companies hunt for new oil and gas drilling sites.

A proposal from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), published last month, lays out a plan to allow five companies to use seismic air guns to conduct geological surveys in area ranging roughly from Florida to New Jersey. The companies, which provide geological information to larger drilling firms, claim that after roughly 30 years without comprehensive mapping, they might find new locations for offshore oil and gas wells.

The mapping itself is conducted by ships firing 180-decibel cannon blasts 24 hours a day, and proponents of the practice say adverse impacts are negligible. But environmental groups, fishing industry advocates, and residents of impacted areas are not convinced. The noises from the air guns—like a continual firework display, but at 1,000 times the volume—can wreak havoc on marine ecosystems by killing zooplankton. Most larger creatures, particularly marine mammals that rely on echolocation, would also experience harmful effects, according to scientists.

President Barack Obama had considered seismic blasting as a way to jump-start East Coast fossil fuel extraction, but ultimately bent to environmental, business, and community pressure and ordered a five-year moratorium on it in the final days of his presidency. The military also strongly opposed blasting, saying it threatened key training areas, and a bipartisan group of 103 U.S. House members signed a letter against it. But President Donald Trump put blasting back on the agenda in April, saying that overruling the ban was part of an “America-First Offshore Energy Strategy” and ordering Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to consider granting new permits to companies conducting blasting.

Major oil companies are not scrambling for blasting, either. Most have shifted their attention away from offshore projects in recent years, motivated by the doubling of American crude oil production in the past decade and deterred by the dangers of offshore drilling. Royal Dutch Shell suspended its Arctic Ocean drilling in 2015, and ConocoPhillips will end deep-water exploration this year.

Following the close of NOAA’s public comment period, permits could be issued almost immediately. Seismic blasting in the Atlantic would then be possibly as soon as this autumn.

A disaster-relief program of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) promises greater flexibility in rebuilding damaged towns and cities, but instead often allows for the diversion of resources from those communities.

FEMA’s Public Assistance Alternative Procedures pilot program, created by the 2013 Sandy Recovery Improvement Act, is designed to provide “substantially greater flexibility in use of federal funds,” with “far less administrative burden.” But a loophole allows essential public buildings to be rebuilt far from impacted areas, or abandoned entirely.

The first beneficiary of Alternative Procedures was Vermont’s state government, which utilized FEMA funding to rebuild offices for state employees outside a flood plain. But in Long Island and West Virginia, some residents claim that the misallocation of FEMA funds has jeopardized their communities’ livelihood and health.

In 2014, in Long Beach, New York, the South Nassau Communities Hospital acquired the Long Beach Medical Center for less than $12 million after the medical center filed for bankruptcy following its destruction in Hurricane Sandy. SNCH received $154 million from FEMA to rebuild the center and restore health services in the Long Beach area. Instead, SNCH put almost all the money into restoring its own facilities, five miles away from Long Beach. Long Beach residents have filed suit in federal court, claiming their equal protection rights were violated.

This past year, following massive flooding in West Virginia, the Nicholas County school board voted to consolidate the damaged middle and high schools of Richwood with schools in Summersville and Craigsville, a plan costing $130 million in FEMA funding. Some students from the three towns, which have a combined population of less than 8,000, would have to commute for almost an hour on twisting mountain roads to a new, centralized facility.

Many Richwood residents were angered by secret negotiations between the school board and FEMA that led to the decision to consolidate rather than rebuild local schools: Richwood High School, considered one of the best in West Virginia, is noted for its marching band and high graduation rate. “The whole town is hung on these schools,” says Mayor Bob Henry Baber.

“I think the flood and the fight for the schools has been such an intense struggle that it has … superseded any other political affiliations,” Baber adds, noting that Democratic Governor Jim Justice favors rebuilding the schools. In June, the West Virginia Board of Education sided with Richwood residents, rejecting the consolidation plan and ordering the county to consider alternatives. The Nicholas County school board promptly sued the state.

While some communities have sought Alternative Procedures funding because of its perceived flexibility, the reality for towns like Richwood and Long Beach can be a loss of local control—and essential funds.

Once again, a bipartisan coalition of fed-up legislators has overridden their intransigent governor’s veto to keep their state from driving off the cliff. On Thursday, Illinois Republicans joined with the Democratic majority in the legislature to override Governor Bruce Rauner’s veto of a $36 billion budget that raises much-needed revenue with income and corporate tax rate increases and brings an end to the longest running budget crisis in the country.

Rauner, a Republican and multimillionaire, has tried to impose his agenda of spending cuts and attacks on labor unions but has long faced staunch resistance in Springfield, which took the form of a more than two-year political standoff over the budget. The financially troubled state has not had an operating budget since Rauner took office in 2015, leading to $15 billion in missed payments and a series of credit downgrades that brought Illinois’s bond rating to the verge of “junk” status.

While Rauner had for years managed to keep Republican legislators under his thumb, ultimately the state’s worsening fiscal disaster and the governor’s obstinacy provoked 11 Republicans to join with Democrats to override his veto.

The end of the Illinois impasse comes just weeks after a similar scenario in which the Kansas’s Republican-controlled legislature, with the help of Democrats, overrode Governor Sam Brownback’s disastrous tax experiment. As I reported for the Prospect’s summer issue, in a matter of five years, Brownback’s radical tax cuts succeeded in throwing the state into fiscal chaos by blowing a massive whole in the state budget and completely failed to generate Brownback’s promised “shot of adrenaline” to the Kansas economy.

And while sanity ultimately prevailed in Kansas and Illinois, it will take both states several years to dig out from underneath the fiscal rubble left by both governors.

Trickle-down tragedies have a long tail.

Tax Cuts for the rich. Deregulation for the powerful. Wage suppression for everyone else. These are the tenets of trickle-down economics, the conservatives’ age-old strategy for advantaging the interests of the rich and powerful over those of the middle class and poor. The articles in Trickle-Downers are devoted, first, to exposing and refuting these lies, but equally, to reminding Americans that these claims aren’t made because they are true. Rather, they are made because they are the most effective way elites have found to bully, confuse and intimidate middle- and working-class voters. Trickle-down claims are not real economics. They are negotiating strategies. Here at the Prospect, we hope to help you win that negotiation.